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Damek Ruthven
Damek Ruthven was a voivode during the time of Dacia under the rule of King Decebalus, and the former landlord of the stronghold that would one night become Hunedoara Castle. Biography Damek was the eldest childe of Lord Ruthven, and one of the most renowned genealogists and scholars of the history of clan Tzimisce. He was also a skilled koldun in the Spirit Ways and a noted Tzimisce warlord in his own right. Inside his fortress-temple, he sat on a throne carved entirely of fused and reshaped bones, draped in thick, dark furs. The skulls of his defeated enemies ringed the dais on which that throne stood, and only a few of them were other than Cainite. The man himself was more than seven feet tall, clearly not the size he had been as a mortal man, but otherwise lacking any signs of obvious reshaping for he did not choose to present himself as entirely inhuman, either in beauty or repulsiveness. Damek Ruthven was not Embraced in his youth. His face was high cheeked and his pale eyes deep set, lined with care and toil. The long, brown beard and the curls spilling over his shoulders were both liberally streaked with white and iron gray. His enormous hands were scarred and rough, his limbs knotted with muscle. He wore antique garments a cap of fur and felt, a long tunic that left his arms bare, baggy trousers and leather sandals, all without the slightest trace of ornamentation. He wore no jewelry or any other obvious signs of his status. The force of his personality filled the throne room with the awareness of his power more completely than any physical symbol could hope. He maintained a number of settlements peopled with an extensive herd and numerous revenant servitors. Damek was fond of grooming brides; having a virgin girl-child instructed in her wifely duties into adulthood before turning her into a ghoul and then, on their wedding night, granting her the embrace. He would then use her as a vassal and then discard her when another caught his eye. This habit, however, found an end centuries after jilting one of his more formidable and notable childe-brides, Danika Ruthven. Destroyed in the interminable internecine clan conflicts that plagued the Dark Medieval era, much of Damek's lands fell to Danika when she pledged her loyalty to those who vanquished him.. Damek Ruthven appears as the Voivode of Sarmizegetusa in the Dark Ages Clan Novel 13: Tzimisce. He is considered to be the most knowledgeable genealogist of the Clan Tzimisce, and secretly the protector of the torpid form of the Tzimisce Antediluvian. Providing this is taken as having a bearing on canon, this would indicate that Damek was still a power in Transylvania in AD 1232. This is evidenced by his obvious status as an honored elder of the clan and his control over the ruins of the ancient Dacian capital, which would have been a prize any Tzimisce warlord would crave. References *Lair of the Hidden, p. 79 *Dark Ages Clan Novel 13: Tzimisce, p. 224, etc Category:Tzimisce Category:Fifth Generation vampires Category:Vampire: The Dark Ages characters